Ataccama and Data Quality

Ataccama started in the data quality space but has gradually expanded its offerings over the years, initially to master data management and then to data catalogue/data governance. In its core data quality market it has a full and rich feature set, as you would expect from a product that has been developing for fifteen years. It covers data profiling, data cleansing, merge/matching, data enrichment, data lineage and more. It has a knowledge graph and has used artificial intelligence to enhance its platform in production since 2016. The product can also connect to a wide range of source systems such as databases and applications like Salesforce, either through its own 40 connectors or via third party connectors. Recently it introduced some data preparation and transformation capability also. Although there are a lot of features, the product is now licenced as just two separate modules, one for data quality and governance and the other for master data management.

Customer Quotes

“Other vendors are transactional in their behavior. With Ataccama, there’s a genuine belief of shared responsibility of success that we feel within T-Mobile.”
Daniel West,
Data Management Lead, T-Mobile

“Ataccama, as a vendor, has been a phenomenal partner: flexibility and understanding of our needs in a pricing structure, system integration needs, deployment support, training and ongoing customer engagement.”
Head of Enterprise Data, Finance Industry

Ataccama ONE covers the full range of data quality functionality. Users can connect to a wide range of data sources and ingest the metadata about these sources, as well as running a range of profiling statistics. This includes such things as record counts, recognising patterns in the data such as postal codes or social security numbers, detecting null values etc. Data quality rules can then be set up and applied to this data, either manually or via the underlying AI in Ataccama suggesting rules to the business users. The AI can also generate draft business descriptions from the data to populate the catalogue. Textual data quality rules can be entered by a business user in normal English and the AI translates this into Ataccama’s underlying scripting language as a business rule. Data quality can also be monitored over time.  A new feature, released in January 2024 is data preparation, a way to build data pipelines. This has a visual interface showing the various stages of process or transformation to be applied such as “read table”, “remove sensitive data”, “standardise contact” etc. Another example of the use of AI in the product is the internal documentation, where you can chat with an AI to search the documentation and come up with answers to questions, saving you from having to search through the documentation yourself.

Ataccama’s products can be deployed either on-premise, in a public or private cloud or a hybrid environment. Ataccama’s data quality suite competes with products like Talend, Informatica and IBM in terms of platform suites, and more specialist products like Experian and others in certain areas like customer name and address validation. It now competes with Collibra in the data quality space, given the latter’s recent acquisition of the OwlDQ data quality product.

Ataccama customers, who range across industries such as financial services, often have quite challenging environments in terms of size and scale, and this has long been a strong point for Ataccama. The vendor recently commissioned a 3rd party market research firm to interview its customer base and this feedback reported a 30-50% productivity increase across customer data management teams, a 10-25% reduction in spending on data management tools, at least a halving of issues related to fraud and compliance breaches, and better outcomes from core business processes due to better data management.

The bottom line

Ataccama has a full-function data quality product with a rich feature set, proven high performance and a substantial customer base that has deployed the product in challenging environments. It should be high on your candidate list if you are looking for a data-quality solution.